A good portion of cryptocurrency supporters are against purging important information and many of them hope that blockchain technology will help boost censorship resistance. A new project in the works called Bookchain aims to record essential books on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain so the written words cannot be silenced, banned, or purged.
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Books Can Remain Free from Cleansings and Purges
The creator of Bookchain, a developer who calls himself ‘Kosinus,’ sees the need for censorship-resistant books that are available on a global level for the whole world to read. There are plenty of books written throughout history that have been banned by a government within the borders of a certain country. Certain ‘unfavorable’ books that have been prone to ‘disappear’ from libraries and censored over the years. This includes titles such as “The Satanic Verses,” “Mein Kampf,” “Memoirs of Hecate County,” and the “Federal Mafia.” Some people believe that in the future governments and authority figures could “cleanse” the world’s libraries of valuable books like the dystopian future described in the novels 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. The creator of Bookchain says the project is a “work in progress” and believes BCH is the perfect platform for storing important and politically unacceptable books.
“Items on the blockchain cannot be subject to censorship, banning or silencing for the duration of the internet,” Bookchain’s creator details on the platform’s website.
The books or written material hosted on Bookchain are tied to BCH addresses which cannot be re-used, explains Kosinus. The text can be edited, but there is a safety measure in place for this functionality because when edits are detected, the newest should take priority. “Edits must not be made 1,008 blocks after the book is marked as complete, and when a successful change is made all previous reviews/curations must be invalidated,” explains the Bookchain website’s protocol specification.
Bookchain Developer Encourages the Upload of Hundreds of Widely Banned and De-Platformed Books
At the moment, the books and written text on Bookchain include “The Virtue Of Selfishness” by Ayn Rand, Wei Dai’s “B-Money,” Cryptome.org’s “The Gentleperson’s Guide To Forum Spies,” and of course, Satoshi Nakamoto’s “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” white paper. The developer explained on the Reddit forum r/btc that he just grabbed a “bunch of random non-copyright books to test the upload tool.” It will be released shortly, says the programmer in response to critics discussing the protocol.
“If you want to upload text like Mein Kampf, or the hundreds of other widely banned and de-platformed books out there, feel free to do so,” the Bookchain creator emphasized.
The upload tool will come out soon, at which point people can upload whatever they want, whether that be illegal books, or important documents, or bedtime stories.
‘Scaling Won’t be a Problem’
In the protocol documentation, the Bookchain website details that there will be “user-specific actions” added soon like the ability to tether an address to the literature so people can donate to the uploader. On Reddit, Kosinus detailed that he needs to do “a lot of testing before full release in a few days” and asked a few Redditors if they had any example books in mind so he could preview them on the website. People interested in the Bookchain’s progress can follow the project on Twitter, on the BCH-powered social media site Memo.cash, and the platform’s developer has a Telegram channel for protocol discussion.
Of course, there are a few BCH proponents on the r/btc forum who are not too keen on storing large text and books that take up a lot of space on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. But the Bookchain programmer doesn’t see scaling as an issue and thinks the BCH network will handle projects like this just fine.
“The solution to this problem is to just keep scaling in line with what we can actually do — But as long as we don’t scale beyond what is possible with whatever current tech is capable of it will never be a problem,” the Bookchain creator stressed on the forum.
Kosinus concluded by stating:
Even if we scale beyond that, there are slight centralization issues, but not more so than IPFS for example, so archival nodes will always exist and data on the blockchain will always be safe.
What do you think about banned books or any types of literature being uploaded to the BCH chain? Let us know what you think about this project in the comments section below.
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Images via Shutterstock, Bookchain, and Pixabay.
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